Second Order Effects
During my 6 month internship at Second Order Effects I was able to work on a variety of projects for clients in industries including aerospace, medical devices, consumer electronics, and agriculture. My contributions to these projects included
- Reducing processing system resource usage in a Zynq Ultrascale+ Multi-Processor System on Chip (MPSoC) by moving the SPI driver for a motor controller to programmable logic, and accordingly updating C++ drivers.
- Executing the layout of a mixed-signal engine controller printed circuit board (PCB) for a client pre-preliminary design review, which achieved a component placement density of over 50%.
- Debugging and verifying the functionality of a thermal control test unit in preparation for client demonstration.
- Soldering CAN bus harnessing and installing emergency stop switches on a prototype agricultural robot.
- Compiling flight controller (FC) market research, which contributed to acquiring an electric vertical takeoff and landing FC design contract.
- Mocking up a preliminary industrial lighting control solution and estimating necessary engineering hours.
- Developing a Python tool for identifying anomalies in recorded engineering hours, and notifying engineers.
Through these projects I was introduced to, and developed several skills including
- PCB Layout
- Firmware Development
- Benchtop Debugging
- Contract Estimation
- Market Research
- Digital Architecture
- Application Containerization
- API Client Development